


There is no will nor force or power on this earth

by PurplishProse (BalthazarB)



Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-28
Updated: 2017-09-29
Packaged: 2018-12-20 23:12:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11931327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BalthazarB/pseuds/PurplishProse
Summary: One Earp sister disappears, and the other must live without her.Except, Wynonna isn't the sister that disappears.***Nicole dreams of a woman with brown hair, Wynonna looks like she's being haunted, and the name Waverly keeps being said.





	1. I cannot say it

Nicole dreams. She dreams of the town square, buildings creaking, wind stirring up dust clouds on the empty street. She dreams of the shop windows being dark, strangely opaque, looking like the surface of a pond at night. She dreams of the sky, cloudless, sun sitting at it's center, strangely still in the shimmering light.

 

Nicole dreams of a woman.

 

She stands in the center of the road, arms outstretched, face upturned towards the light. Her hair is soft and brown and flowing gently in the breeze, though everything else is still. She looks calm. At peace, almost, though a small furrow remains between her brows, like she's thinking too hard about something.

 

Her arms are coated, from the elbow down, in gold leaf. It shimmers in the sunlight, making her look like a figure in a Renaissance painting, holy and pure in every way.

 

Something lingers on the tip of Nicole's tongue.

 

Another woman, taller, more powerful, parts the glass of a storefront like a bead curtain, stepping through and onto the dirt in such a way that Nicole feels fear in the pit of her stomach. She walks towards the dreamer, silver-coated arms beckoning, and the moon rises, and rises until it covers the sun.

 

There's a scream and a twang, like the air itself snaps into place, and when the moon and the silver woman move, the sun and her angel are gone.

 

***

 

Her first encounter with Wynonna is nothing short of unpleasant, with the woman refusing to help her solve what should be a routine case in any way. She's cold and hard, glaring suspiciously at the badge on Nicole's shoulder like she distrusts it, hands moving like they ached to be around something.

 

Dolls, the new officer from that special task force, waits outside, face drawn. His eyes flicker over Wynonna like a mathematician looking at a problem.  They're in the station.

 

Nicole tries once more, begging for information on the gang that haunts the trailer parks, but Wynonna just glares, face drawn and pale, refusing to say anything at all.

 

When she leaves, Dolls smirks at her, and she feels defeated.

 

***

 

She dreams again of the woman. This time she's awake, she's looking at her, begging, but the sound isn't there. Gold hands claw at a glass pane, and she mouths her name over and over, _Nicole Nicole Nicole Nicole,_ but Nicole doesn’t remember. Something lies on the tip of her tongue, like a pebble in a shoe.

 

***

 

She sees Wynonna around often enough, as she works for the black badge. She always has a drink or a donut, sometimes both, and always looks haunted by something she can't see, and Nicole yearns to help. Nedley calls her trouble, Gus calls her broken, and she calls herself crazy, but Nicole isn't willing to believe any of it.

 

She was the town pariah, once.

 

So one night, when Wynonna steps out of the drunk tank, leaning heavily on the bars of the door, Nicole offers to take her home. Her shift is ending, after all, and there's no way Wynonna could drive in her state.

 

Wynonna sneers, and then agrees when she trips over herself a second later.

 

The car ride is silence, mostly, with the occasional hiccup from her passenger. It feels wrong to put on music.

 

(It feels wrong, it feels wrong, everything feels wrong, something is WRONG WRONG WRONG)

 

When they get to the door, Wynonna turns and says:  
  
"Can you stay the night?"

 

Nicole is shocked by it, expecting nothing but more hostility from the woman. Wynonna looks vulnerable. Guilty.

 

"I just… I can't sleep. I feel alone, I think. And you're good. I don’t know how I know that, but I do." is what Wynonna ends up saying, mouth wearing the syllables like it doesn’t quite know how, and Nicole understands.

 

It's a hollowness that lives inside her, a shadow where her heart should be. Something is missing. Something important.

 

(It was on the tip of her tongue, tasting thick and sticky and sad.)

 

"Sure." she says.

 

They sleep on the couch like old friends, legs tangled and hair astray, and Nicole is afraid of how comfortable she feels. She shouldn’t be this way with a stranger.

 

(Not a stranger, her mind whispers.)

 

***

 

Nicole wakes first and moves to the kitchen to make breakfast. She knows where all the ingredients are without looking. She knows there's a bottle of whiskey hidden behind the china plates in one of the upper cupboards.

 

It's when Wynonna walks in and frowns at the third mug on the bench that she realizes how wrong something is. The first two are coffee (black and sugarless for Wynonna, plenty of milk and plenty of sugar for Nicole), and the third one is tea. Herbal tea.

 

"Planning on inviting a friend over?" Wynonna asks through a mouthful of pancake, flicking the mug lightly with her finger.

 

"No? sorry, I don't know why I made three," she says, frowning at the cup. The smell of peppermint wafts out.

 

"How'd you know how I like my coffee, anyway?"  
  
Nicole doesn’t know.

 

There's a pang in her chest as she pours the tea down the sink. She ignores it, and puts the mug gently on the drying rack.

 

***

 

They've become friends somehow. Nicole is as confused about it as Wynonna seems to be.

 

"I can't believe this. I'm friends with a _cop_ ," she says over a glass of whiskey at Shorty's.

 

"Wynonna. You work for the police. You're an honorary deputy for the black badge."

  
"Well, yeah. That too."

 

There's a short silence filled with the clacks of pool balls knocking against one-another and the sounds of drinks being poured.

 

"Nicole?" Wynonna says. It's soft.

 

"Yeah?"  
  
"I think.… I think you might be my first friend in a long time."

 

There's silence after that. Nicole presses herself against Wynonna's side, and Wynonna leans into her.

 

"You better not be expecting any more of that feelings bullshit, though," She says again after a while, "one time only."

 

"I know," Nicole says, smiling into Wynonna's hair.

 

***

 

She's started to sleep over at the homestead regularly, helping Wynonna make it into somewhere that could be deemed habitable by living beings other than the occasional rat. It feels right in a world that feels so very, very wrong.

 

She catches herself almost daily with her hand resting upon the door handle to the spare bedroom. The one time she'd been in there, she'd run to the bathroom and thrown up, stomach twisting at the empty floorboards and bare, bare walls.

 

She doesn’t tell Wynonna but sees her staring at it sometimes. Haunted.

 

Sometimes, when Wynonna's out, she makes a cup of peppermint tea. She doesn’t drink it. She leaves it on the table, and the smell makes her feel like the world is a little more right than it is.

 

***

 

She dreams of a sister, a punch to the chest, the air being knocked out of her and struggling to breathe, breathe, breathe.

 

The woman with the golden arms is above her. she cradles Nicole softly, hands warm on her back, her face. The woman begs her not to die, and with a feeling worse than any bullet, Nicole realizes she's in love.

 

She wakes up to Wynonna, hair astray, shaking her so violently she's almost pushed off the couch and onto the floor.

 

"Jesus, Nicole, don’t scare me like that. You were gasping for air and screaming something and, god, you could sleep through a fucking earthquake with how hard It was to wake you up."  
 

She's worried. That much is clear.

 

"What was I screaming?" Nicole pants, one hand unconsciously crawling its way up to her chest, pressing on the point the bullet hit so hard it hurt.

 

"A name, I think. Waverly."  
 

It doesn’t mean anything. She's disappointed.

 

When she finally removes her finger, she realizes she's bleeding out of a crescent shaped cut.

 

***

 

 

Nicole discovers the scar when she's drying herself off after a shower. She really should have noticed it before, because god, it's glaringly obvious, but her eyes seem to have slid over it every time. Like she expected it to be there.

 

But she had no idea how she'd got it.

 

It's a set of what appears to be bite marks, silvery and pale against the skin of her wrist, but red at the center, like it's recent. Its outline was almost blue in the bathroom's fluorescent lights. It hurts slightly when she prods it. She tries to remember, tries to cast her mind back, but all she gets is the memory of pain and fear, real fear, before she has to stop.

 

(There were more when she went looking for them. A scratch on the temple. Bruises on her ribs. Thin white lines over her arms, her chest, her head. She didn’t remember most of them.)

 

She shows it to Wynonna the next day at the office in the break room. Wynonna has her legs up on the table, thick leather boots crossed over one another, a powdered donut clutched in one hand. She looks less gaunt now, but still haunted. Still troubled.

 

When Nicole bares her wrist, Wynonna doesn’t notice it until she points it out.

 

"Jesus, Nicole, what the fuck?" is all she says, eyes wide, grabbing her wrist to inspect it.

 

"Yeah, no kidding. I don't even remember how it happened, but I swear I didn’t have it a month ago."

 

"You think you'd remember being bitten, dude," is what Wynonna says, staring at it with trepidation before telling her to hold on and disappearing into the black badge office.

 

She returns with a squirrelly looking man, who's being dragged out by the lapels of his lab coat.

 

Wynonna jabs a finger at the bite, and looks to him expectantly.

 

"What?" he says.

 

"Jeremy, you're smart. You know things. Tell me what did that."  
  
" _What_ did that?" Nicole interjects. Neither Wynonna or Jeremy appear to notice.

 

Jeremy sighs and leans down, holding the scar up to the light, turning Nicole's wrist gently this way and that. His tongue peeks out of the corner of his mouth. Then, his entire face falls, like someone who realizes they've been locked out of their house,   and his eyebrows move upwards so quickly she's surprised they don't knock his hairline back several inches.

 

He then grabs Wynonna by the back of her jacket, and looking absolutely terrified, drags her backwards into the BBD office.

 

The door swings shut with a sad creaking sound.

 

"Cool," Nicole says to the gluten-free pizza sitting in front of her.

 

After another moment, she shrugs and sweeps it into the trash.

 

***

 

Wynonna hasn’t spoken to her since the bite, and it's been a week. It's not like they don’t see each other. They work in the same building. Nonetheless, all Wynonna has done is walk around her in wide circles and glare at her like a cat being introduced to a Roomba.

 

Suffice to say, it puts a real damper on your social life when your one friend decides to treat you like a potential plague-carrier.

 

So Nicole sits at home, binge watching Xena with Calamity sprawled out on her lap, tail twitching slightly as she dreams. It's Friday now. She expects it'll be another quiet night.

 

Unfortunately, she is very wrong.

 

This is primarily because a man with bad hair and a fur coat bursts through her window.

 

It happens very quickly. Calamity makes a noise like a balloon releasing air and scrambles into the kitchen as Nicole's brain desperately tries to process what the hell is going on, and she's grabbing for her gun, clicking the safety off and aiming it.

 

Macklemore Jr. laughs. Her gun, like pulled by an invisible string, flies out of her hands and into his.

 

"Trying to coerce me into covering up the robbery of a thrift store?" she pants.

 

That gets her one second of confusion before his face morphs back into it's apparent default, Creepy As Hell. It was not  a fetching look.

 

"Very funny. Waverly should keep you. Now, speaking of her, where is she?"

 

Waverly. Huh.

 

"I have no idea," she says, truthfully.

 

He doesn’t take this well. She can tell, mostly because he grabs her by the neck and slams her into the wall. Cool. She loves concussions.

 

(One hand is hidden, behind her back, fingers sliding over a screen.)

 

"This isn't the time for jokes, jolly ginger giant." He clicks his teeth together in a way that people everywhere absolutely do not do.

 

"Not a joke. Don't know a Waverly, sorry." she wheezes. He leans in closer. His teeth are bared. The back of her mind notices his very sharp canines.

 

"Have you tried the yellow pages?" she suggests.

 

Both the wall and her skull seem very upset at the next beating.

 

"Hmm, seems her little puppy-dog speaks the truth. An… interesting development."

 

He grins again, and leans in close, lips brushing against her ear.

 

"It seems someone has cast a spell on you."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	2. Words can't convey it

Nicole laughed. Sure, something was off, and a spell maybe wasn’t the most unbelievable thing she'd seen or heard in the past month or so, but hearing a man who looked like he'd raided grandma's wardrobe say it out loud was something else. To hear it so blatantly admitted aloud. It was, she thought, kind of funny.

 

That might have been the concussion, though.

 

Then, she sees, through the broken window, a flicker. It could be nothing. It could also be someone in a leather jacket trying not to step on her petunias.

 

A lot of things happen then, in a very short space of time.

 

Wynonna, gun in hand, bursts through the same window, sending more glass sliding across the floor.

 

"Bobo" she growls, more serious than she's ever been.

 

 Nicole absolutely loses her shit.

 

"Bobo? Really? Bobo is your na-"

 

'Bobo' drops her onto the floor.

 

"Earp. It's always nice meeting up with the one that got away," he says, hands moving through the air like sharks through the ocean.

 

"Could say the same to you. Care to accept the title 'another of the ones I sent to hell' instead?"

 

He snaps his teeth.

 

"I think I'll decline that offer."

 

"Ooh. Sorry, it's a package deal with 'the asshole that hurt my friend', and it seems you've already purchased that one," Wynonna says, flicking the barrel of her gun towards Nicole.

 

Nicole waves.

 

"Tch. Thought you'd be better at protecting your friends by now," he says, tilting his head to the side and narrowing his eyes before continuing, "though it seems you aren’t very adept at protecting sisters either."

 

Wynonna flinches.

 

"You don't get to say that. You're the one who killed her."

 

"Oh, you really don't know anything, do you? You're the one who killed one of your sisters and let the other disappear."

 

A furrow appears between her brow.

 

"I only have one sister."

 

"Hmph. Technically true, I suppose, but I always thought you were into all that mushy 'more than blood' type stuff."

 

"The more you spout cryptic nonsense, the more I want to put a bullet through that thick skull of yours. "  
  
He snorts before stomping towards Nicole, placing a heavily booted foot upon her chest.

 

"Now, I'd listen closely if I were you. I'm doing you a favour. This will not happen again. If you want to see Waverly again, you'll talk to the blacksmith's sister. And remember; I'm doing this for Waverly, not either of you."  
 

The boot lifts, and Nicole can breathe again.  Wynonna remains rooted to the spot, glowing gun barrel still pointed directly between Bobo's eyes. Uncertainty mars her features.

 

Before she can shoot, the air seems to blur, and he's gone.

 

Nicole and Wynonna are left alone. Wind howls through the broken window that frames Wynonna like she was a figure in a renaissance painting, street light shining through her hair like a halo. Nicole, however, lies on the floor like a discarded kid's toy.

 

Glass crunches underneath Wynonna's boot as she bends down next to Nicole, turning her head over so that she can prod the back of it with a worried look on her face. Her fingertips come away red.

 

"Shit, Nicole. Nedley's gonna kill me if I've gotten you hurt." she whispers.

 

"Not your fault."  
  
"Oh, Fuck off with that stoic bullshit. Bobo is my enemy, and he came after my best friend. I'm taking that personally so that I'll punch harder when I see him again."  
 

"Wow. My hero," Nicole laughs. God, she's missed Wynonna, and the hospital can wait until she finds whatever is accountable for the dead air over the past week.

 

"Why've you been avoiding me?" she asks.

 

Wynonna looks troubled. Eyes averted, she stares at the floorboards as her tongue silently tries to construct itself an answer.

 

"The bite. We figured out what it was from. Nobody should have survived that. Nobody human, I mean. I guess with all the bullshit in my life I assumed our friendship was too good to be true, or whatever. Thought you might've been a demon or something."

 

Nicole tries to process the sentence like a drunk trying to provide tech support. The words 'Human' and 'Demon' refuse to mesh with anything currently stored in her brain.

 

"What?" Nicole says.

 

"Eh, I'll explain later."

 

"I think I'm going insane."

 

***

 

The hospital was blank, white walled, and eerily familiar. It didn’t help that Wynonna was shoving her down the hallway with all the fervor of a worried older sister, the two of them almost tripping over a variety of patients.  Waiting at the front desk for Wynonna's gesticulating to register with the old woman that slouched tiredly in her chair, Nicole's eyes were drawn to a room she could just see from down the hallway.

 

Her arm slipped out of Wynonna's grasp, feet leading her towards the polished handle, fingers reaching out to touch.

 

It hit like a spark of static electricity.

 

Pain. Throbbing, all consuming pain, vibrating through her bones, pouring from the veins of her wrist, thick and senseless and enough to send her onto her knees. She remembered teeth. Human teeth, biting, cutting through tendon and flesh, sweat sticking to her hospital gown as she writhed. Fingers grasped at pale sheets. And she was there. Short and brown-haired, and crying, shaking hands clinging to Nicole's face with the tenderness of a lover. Nicole mouthed words she would never say to a stranger, and the stranger didn’t mouth them back, instead pleading and grasping at Nicole as if to pull her back into consciousness.

 

Regardless, Nicole slipped away.

 

***

 

She dreamed again, brighter and more vivid than ever before. It was the same woman. Always the same woman. Together they sat, hands clasped, in the barn out by Wynonna's homestead, warm honey-thick light seeping through the cracks in the wall. This time, though, Nicole was lucid enough to ask, to beg for a name.

 

"Who are you?" she whispered.

 

The woman looked confused at that, brilliant smile faltering slightly, brow scrunching perfectly into the picture of puzzlement.

 

"Is that supposed to be hypothetical? We've been dating for a month, babe." The woman says, hand sliding slightly away from Nicole's on the bed.

 

"No. No, I don’t get it, who-"

 

And then it clicked. Sliding into place with the perfection of a puzzle piece, it all came together.

 

"Waverly," Nicole breathed.

 

She brightened again at that, still retaining the confusion in her eyes. Nicole could see it now, in a way. Her relation to Wynonna. Not so much in the features, but in the way she moved, sudden and energetic. In the way she spoke, in the way she moved her hands, the way emotions flickered across her face, it was all familiar. Nicole felt a pang somewhere near her heart. Maybe this is what Wynonna would be like if she wasn’t so closed off and broken.

 

The hypothetical Waverly Earp took a deep breath in, worry creasing her features once again, hand clenching over Nicole's.

 

"Are you ok? The doctors said you were fully recovered, but if you feel like the poison's still affecting you, I'll drive you back to the hospital immediately. I mean, it's probably not possible to immediately recover from demon venom, and I guess that really only happened a little while ago, but-"

 

"Tea."  
  
"What?"  
  
"Peppermint herbal tea. That's your favourite, right? And your room is the one on the second floor, near Willa's old one?"

 

It all made so much sense. So much stupid, terrible sense. That missing feeling, the unexplainable things, the fact that Nicole knew where everything was in the homestead.

 

Fuck.

 

"Well, I actually prefer cinnamon black tea, but it's scientifically proven that peppermint tea has a whole bunch of health benefits, and you've been to my room enough times to know that that's where it is, so I don't really know where you're going with all this."  
 

Nicole takes a second. Traces the outline of Waverly's jaw with her eyes, lets the pad of her thumb slide across Waverly's knuckles, tries to trigger something other than this feeling of vague familiarity that nags at her gut.

 

Waverly looks at her. really looks.

 

"Something's wrong." she says.

 

Her hand, soft and familiar, brushes against Nicole's cheek.

 

Then the bright hospital lights come into focus, and Nicole wakes up.

 

***

  
  
Wynonna's been seething since she woke up. She's silently vibrating at the wheel now, shooting Nicole murderous glances in the side mirror even though they're sitting right next to each other.

 

"So, any other hidden Earp sisters you want to tell me about?"

 

"I don't even know how you know about Willa. I sure as fuck didn’t tell you."  
  
"Will you stop suspecting me of being a demon in disguise for one second? This isn't Scooby Doo. I'm not about to whip off a mask and reveal my swamp monster form underneath."  
  
Wynonna fully turns away from the dark, winding path in front to lecture her. Nicole's cop senses scream about bad driving.

 

"First of all, have you ever seen an episode of Scooby Doo? That's not how it worked. The monsters turned out to be human after all, you fuck."  
  
Nicole almost chokes on her chemical-scented paper cup of hospital water.

  
"You can tolerate me knowing the unknowable, but not Scooby Doo mistakes?"  
  
 

"Shut up. Secondly, if you've lead the life I have, you soon learn that everything good turns out to be shitty, and demons are everywhere."

 

"Ok, thanks. Not to be a killjoy, but shouldn’t you be trying to bring back your disappeared sister rather than telling _me_ , someone who didn’t know demons and zombies or whatever were a thing until tonight, about the fact that it's perfectly reasonable to suspect me of secret satanic tendencies?"

 

Rather than concede to Nicole's point, Wynonna inflates like a balloon, filled with another round of angry energy.

 

"Thirdly. My supposed sister."  
  
"Hoo boy. What's your hot take on this one? Is she a secret demon too?"

 

"If you don’t shut up I'm pushing you out of this moving vehicle."  
  
"...ok."  
  
"Now, the only people who've mentioned her are you and Bobo."  
  
Nicole snorts. Bobo.

 

"-And I don’t trust either of you."

 

"Ok. If this is about the shitty bite mark on my wrist that hurts like a bitch when I attempt paperwork, I don’t know fuck about how I survived that either."

 

"Well then. Tomorrow, why don't we go see a witch about a woman?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> haha wow its been a while! sorry about that! im planning on updating more now that i have far more free time, so all my fics should (and i say should) actually be getting updates. sorry this one is so short, i just wanted to put something out there so i was motivated to write more! anyway, all the kudos and comments have been Filling My Whole Heart With Joy, so thanks!!! Tumblr is Lesbianesques

**Author's Note:**

> "wow jan, your mom lets you have THREE unfinished fics?" fhjdfsd im so sorry
> 
> this one should be pretty short tho
> 
> anyway find me on tumblr at lesbianesques.tumblr.com for more? of? this?
> 
> check out my fun werewolf fic and my cool ghost fic also! 
> 
> if you comment and kudos i love you. im crying also.


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